Part 19 (2/2)

The single, tear-reddened eye glared at him suspiciously, then became wary. ”I don't know.”

”Was it Dexter Sprague, Lydia?”

”Sprague?” She spat the name out contemptuously. ”No! She didn't know him then, except to speak to at the moving picture studio.”

”When did he become her--lover, Lydia?” Dundee asked casually.

The woman stiffened, became menacingly hostile. ”Who says he was her lover? You can't trick me, Mr. Detective! I'd cut my tongue out before I'd let you make me say one word against my poor girl!”

Dundee shrugged. He knew a stone wall when he ran up against one.

”Lydia,” he began again, after a thoughtful pause, ”I have proof that Nita Selim was sure you had never forgiven her for the injury she did you.” His fingers touched the letter in his pocket--that incredible ”Last Will and Testament” which Nita had written the day before she was murdered....

”And that's another lie!” the woman cried, shaking with anger. She struggled to her feet, stood swaying dizzily a moment. ”Come upstairs with me to her room, and I'll show _you_ some proof that I had forgiven her!... Come along, I tell you!... Trying to make me say _I_ killed my poor girl, when I'd have died for her--Come on, I tell you!”

And Dundee, wondering, beginning to doubt his own conviction a little--that conviction which had sprung full-grown out of Nita's strange, informal will, and which had seemed to explain everything--followed Lydia Carr from her bas.e.m.e.nt room to the bedroom in which Nita had been murdered....

”See this!” and Lydia Carr s.n.a.t.c.hed up the powder box from the dressing-table. Her long, bony fingers busied themselves with frantic haste, and suddenly, into the silence of the room came the tinkle of music. ”_I_ bought her this--for a present, out of my own money, soon as I got out of the hospital!” the maid's voice shrilled, over the slow, sweet, tinkly notes. ”It's playing her name song--_Juanita_. It was playing that song when she died. I stood there in the doorway and heard it--” and she pointed toward the door leading from Nita's room into the back hall. ”She loved it and used it all the time, because I gave it to her.... And _this_!”

She set the musical powder box upon the dressing-table and rushed across the room to one of the several lamps that Dundee had noticed on his first survey of the room. It was the largest and gaudiest of the collection--a huge bowl of filigreed bronze, set with innumerable stones, as large as marbles, or larger. Red, yellow and green stones that must have cast a strange radiance over the pretty head that had been wont to lie just beneath it, on the heaped lace pillows of the chaise lounge, Dundee reflected.

As if Lydia had read his thoughts, she jerked at the little chain which hung from the bottom of the big bronze bowl against the heavy metal standard.

”I gave her this--saved up for it out of my own money!” she was a.s.suring him with savage triumph in proving her point. ”And she loved it so she brought it with us when we came from New York--It won't light! It was working all right last night, because my poor little girl was lying there, looking so pretty under the colored lights--”

With strong twists of her big hands Lydia began to unscrew the filigreed bronze bowl. As she lifted it off she exclaimed blankly:

”Why, look! The light bulb's--_broke_!”

But Dundee had already seen--not only the broken light bulb but the explanation of the queer noise that Flora Miles had described hysterically over and over, as ”a bang or a b.u.mp.” The chaise lounge stood between the two windows that opened upon the drive. And at the head of it stood the big lamp, just a few inches from the wall and only a foot from the window frame upon which Dr. Price had pencilled the point to indicate the end of the imaginary line along which the shot which killed Nita Leigh Selim had traveled.

The ”bang or b.u.mp” which Flora Miles had heard had been made by the knocking of the big lamp against the wall. Undoubtedly the one who had b.u.mped into the lamp was Nita's murderer--or murderess--in frantic haste to make an escape.

_And that meant that the murderer had fled toward the back hall, not through the window in front of which he had stood, not through the door leading onto the front porch...._ A little progress, at least!

But Lydia was not through proving that she had forgiven her mistress.

She was s.n.a.t.c.hing things from Nita's clothes closet--

”See these mules with ostrich feathers?--I give 'em to my girl!... And this bed jacket? I embroidered the flowers on it with my own hands--”

Through her flood of proof Dundee heard the whir of a car's engine, then the loud banging of a car's door.... Running footsteps on the flagstone path.... Dundee reached the front door just as the bell pealed shrilly.

”h.e.l.lo, Dundee! Awfully glad I caught you before you left.... Is poor Lydia still here?”

”Come in, Mr. Miles,” Dundee invited, searching with a puzzled frown the round, blond face of Tracey Miles. ”Yes, Lydia is still here.... Why?”

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